Strategic Research

Comparative Bioinformatics (T-Coffee)

The main focus of the group is the development of novel algorithms for the comparison of multiple biological sequences. Multiple comparisons have the advantage of precisely revealing evolutionary traces, thus allowing the identification of functional constraints imposed on the evolution of biological entities. Most comparisons are currently carried out on the basis of sequence similarity.

Our goal is to extend this scope by allowing comparisons based on any relevant biological signal such as sequence homology, structural similarity, genomic structure, functional similarity and more generally any signal that may be identified within biological sequences.

Using such heterogeneous signals serves two complementary purposes:

  1. producing better models that take advantage of the signal evolutionary resilience,
  2. improving our understanding of the evolutionary processes that lead to the diversification of biological functions.

All the applications related to our work are provided to the community through an international network of web servers that can be accessed from http://www.tcoffee.org

Main projects

Website

Institutions

Bioinformatics expertise:

Group Leader:

Cedric Notredame

Bioinformatics services offered

  • T-Coffee multiple Sequence alignment, a suite of online servers for the computation of RNA, Protein and DNA multiple sequence alignments

    http://www.tcoffee.org

  • Nextflow scripting language, a framework for the rapid and efficient parallelisation of bioinformatics and genomics high-throughput pipelines

    http://www.nextflow.io